Climategate

[DarrylMueller]

Climategate: E-mail Scandal Could Melt Copenhagen Plans | Print | E-mail
Written by William F. Jasper
Monday, 23 November 2009 15:30
http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/tech-mainmenu-30/environment/2383-climategate-e-mail-scandal-could-melt-copenhagen-plans

climate gateAs was reported here previously, the release of thousands of e-mails and documents from a climate research center threatens to expose some of the biggest scientific names in the global warming debate to serious charges of fraud, unethical attacks on colleagues, censorship of opposing viewpoints, and possible criminal destruction and withholding of evidence.

Michael Mann, James Hansen, Phil Jones, Michael Oppenheimer, Stephen Schneider, Kevin Trenberth — these are but a few of the "big guns" of global warming alarmism who are unfavorably exposed in the documents that were posted on the Internet by unknown hackers who penetrated the computer system of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at Britain's University of East Anglia.

Phil Jones, the director of the CRU, especially comes off very poorly in the newly revealed documents. In an e-mail of January 29, 2004 to Michael Mann, Jones refers to the recent death of global warming critic John L. Daly with this churlish comment: "In an odd way this is cheering news!" In the same e-mail, Jones then suggests to Mann that he has obtained legal advice that he does not have to comply with Freedom Of Information (FOI) requests from other scientists to release data and codes underlying his research claims. Devising ways to delay and deny FOI requests is the subject of additional e-mails, such as one from Jones to Gavin Schmidt (with a copy to Michael Mann) of August 20, 2009, arguing that the data from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is exempt from these requests. Jones writes:

The FOI line we're all using is this. IPCC is exempt from any countries FOI — the skeptics have been told this.

The IPCC's reports, of course, have been presented as the "last word" on climate science by Al Gore and most of the major media. Like all other UN agencies and programs, the IPCC claims to adhere to the highest standards of "transparency." However, many distinguished scientists, including former IPCC scientists, have objected to the IPCC's opaque process and criticize the unwillingness of the IPCC to release data it cites as the basis for its extravagant claims.

Some of the e-mails seem to confirm concerns that Jones, Mann, et al, have destroyed data that could expose their fraudulent methods. That appears to be the case here, where Jones suggests to Mann that he delete certain e-mails that apparently dealt with the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), which was released in 2007. He also suggests they get other colleagues to delete related material.

 In another e-mail to Mann, Jones may have set himself up for legal prosecution for attempting to thwart the UK's newly passed FOI law. Jones says, "I think I'll delete the file rather than send [it] to anyone," and "We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind."

"Hockey Sticks" and Hokey Data

Michael E. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center (ESSC) at Pennsylvania State University, is the lead author of the now-discredited "Hockey Stick" graph used by the IPCC and Al Gore (most notably in his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth) to "prove" man-made, or anthropogenic, global warming (AGW). 

In a particularly damning e-mail exchange from 2003, Mann and Jones discuss a scheme for getting rid of Hans Von Storch, the editor of the journal Climate Research, for publishing the contrary research of distinguished fellow scientists.*

This theme of getting rid of Von Storch appears again in other e-mails, such as this exchange between climate alarmists Tom Wigley and Timothy Carter (with a copy to Phil Jones).

 And Hans Von Storch is not the only professional targeted by the climate activists, who appear to have taken political correctness to new levels in silencing those in the scientific community that voice disagreement with their apocalyptic scenarios. Among other examples is an October 12, 2009 e-mail exchange among Stephen Schneider, Michael Mann, Kevin Trenbreth, and one of Schneider's students. The student brings to their attention a BBC report that deviates from the BBC's usual The-Sky-Is-Falling! AGW propaganda. The student writes:

Paul Hudson, BBC's reporter on climate change, on Friday wrote that there's been no warming since 1998, and that pacific oscillations will force cooling for the next 20-30 years. It is not outrageously biased in presentation as are other skeptics' views.

The BBC report, in this case, was on the mark, as most scientists now agree (and even many of the alarmists now admit — though some still try to explain away) that global temperatures actually have cooled for the past decade. (See, for example here, here, and here.) Stephen H. Schneider, professor of environmental studies at Woods Institute for the Environment, passes on the student's query, asking his colleagues if they would like to try explaining "the past 10 years of global mean temperature trend stasis," which he recognizes as a problem in terms of keeping the public panicked over climate change.

Yes, this is the same Stephen Schneider who prior to 1978 was proclaiming that man-made CO2 emissions were going to drive planet Earth into global cooling and a new Ice Age. It is also the same Stephen Schneider who admitted in a 1996 paper that "scientists" sometimes have to use scare tactics, exaggerations, and suppression of doubts and contrary evidence in order to win public support for desired political policies. He said winning support required "loads of media coverage," and to obtain that scientists would have to "offer up scary scenarios." Here is the full quote:

On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the
 scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole
 truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the
 doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we
 are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people
 we'd like to see the world a better place, which in this context
 translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially
 disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting
 loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make
 simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts
 we might have.... Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

Michael Mann responds to Schneider's October 12, 2009 e-mail indicating that he will contact the Met Office (the British meteorological agency) and the BBC about the Paul Hudson report, which was causing the alarmists so much angst. Based on the other e-mails, as well as on what has been previously reported elsewhere about other retaliatory attacks, it may not be far-fetched to infer that Mann was intimating that he would have pressure applied to Hudson to toe the AGW line.

An amusing admission against interest in the above exchange (October 12, 2009) is this comment by Kevin Trenberth, who can't figure out what to say about the historic low temperatures:

Hi all

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low. This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather).

Trenberth then goes on to admit: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." 

However, the alarmists' admitted inability to explain away this enormous fact has not lessened their certitude nor dampened their zeal for implementing a planetary climate regime.

The release of the e-mails has come at an inopportune time for many of the "experts" who may be appearing at — or whose scientific research is prominently tied to — the fast approaching United Nations climate change summit in Copenhagen, Denmark. Claiming that man-made emissions are causing calamitous global warming, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to be voted on in Copenhagen will call for global governmental mandates to regulate and tax all human activities.

Public awareness of the content of the CRU e-mails could significantly undercut support for the UNFCCC. Thus, many of the media organs that have been most vociferous in promoting the global warming hype have been curiously subdued in reporting on the recent "Climategate" scandal. The University of East Anglia said that the purloined e-mails and documents had been selectively leaked to undermine "the strong consensus that human activity is affecting the world's climate in ways that are potentially dangerous." And, it seems, much of the media are content to go with that spin.

Many of the scientists in the "realist" or "skeptic" community, including those who have borne the brunt of attacks by Mann, Jones, et al, have not weighed in on the matter yet. Many voices on the realist/skeptic blogs and web sites expressed the need for caution, suggesting the e-mail releases could even be a hoax, or that false e-mails and documents could be mixed in with those that are genuine. That is a possibility. However, according to reports in the New York Times and elsewhere, some of the emails have been confirmed as genuine by the named authors. It may be some time before all of this massive trove of documents is vetted and certified. In the meantime, one of the websites that has sifted through a significant number of the emails and provided helpful summaries of their content, can be accessed here.



* Those scientists mentioned by name are: Willie Soon, a physicist at the Solar and Stellar Physics Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and an astronomer at the Mount Wilson Observatory; Sallie Baliunas, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the Solar, Stellar, and Planetary Sciences Division and Senior Scientist at the George C. Marshall Institute; Patrick Michaels, retired Research Professor of Environmental Sciences from the University of Virginia and former state climatologist for Virginia; and William Gray, a pioneer in hurricane forecasting, Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University (CSU), and head of the Tropical Meteorology Project at CSU.

[DarrylMueller]

From the Telegraph.co.uk 11/23/09
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/enviro ... uotes.html
University of East Anglia emails: the most contentious quotes
Here are a selection of quotes from the emails stolen from computers at the University of East Anglia. Many involve Phil Jones, head of the university's Climatic Research Unit.


Published: 2:56PM GMT 23 Nov 2009

From: Phil Jones. To: Many. Nov 16, 1999
"I've just completed Mike's Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

Critics cite this as evidence that data was manipulated to mask the fact that global temperatures are falling. Prof Jones claims the meaning of "trick" has been misinterpreted

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From Phil Jones To: Michael Mann (Pennsylvania State University). July 8, 2004
"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

The IPCC is the UN body charged with monitoring climate change. The scientists did not want it to consider studies that challenge the view that global warming is genuine and man-made.

From: Kevin Trenberth (US National Center for Atmospheric Research). To: Michael Mann. Oct 12, 2009
"The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't... Our observing system is inadequate"

Prof Trenberth appears to accept a key argument of global warming sceptics - that there is no evidence temperatures have increased over the past 10 years.

From: Phil Jones. To: Many. March 11, 2003
“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”

Prof Jones appears to be lobbying for the dismissal of the editor of Climate Research, a scientific journal that published papers downplaying climate change.

From Phil Jones. To: Michael Mann. Date: May 29, 2008
"Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise."

Climate change sceptics tried to use Freedom of Information laws to obtain raw climate data submitted to an IPCC report known as AR4. The scientists did not want their email exchanges about the data to be made public.

From: Michael Mann. To: Phil Jones and Gabi Hegerl (University of Edinburgh). Date: Aug 10, 2004
"Phil and I are likely to have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots in the near future."

The scientists make no attempt to hide their disdain for climate change sceptics who request more information about their work.

[DarrylMueller]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... nised.html
Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995

By Jonathan Petre
Last updated at 5:12 PM on 14th February 2010

* Comments (975)
* Add to My Stories


* Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing
* There has been no global warming since 1995
* Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes

Professor Phil Jones

Data: Professor Phil Jones admitted his record keeping is 'not as good as it should be'

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made.

Professor Jones has been in the spotlight since he stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit after the leaking of emails that sceptics claim show scientists were manipulating data.

The raw data, collected from hundreds of weather stations around the world and analysed by his unit, has been used for years to bolster efforts by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to press governments to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

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* MAIL ON SUNDAY COMMENT: The professor's amazing climate change retreat

Following the leak of the emails, Professor Jones has been accused of ‘scientific fraud’ for allegedly deliberately suppressing information and refusing to share vital data with critics.

Discussing the interview, the BBC’s environmental analyst Roger Harrabin said he had spoken to colleagues of Professor Jones who had told him that his strengths included integrity and doggedness but not record-keeping and office tidying.

Mr Harrabin, who conducted the interview for the BBC’s website, said the professor had been collating tens of thousands of pieces of data from around the world to produce a coherent record of temperature change.

That material has been used to produce the ‘hockey stick graph’ which is relatively flat for centuries before rising steeply in recent decades.

According to Mr Harrabin, colleagues of Professor Jones said ‘his office is piled high with paper, fragments from over the years, tens of thousands of pieces of paper, and they suspect what happened was he took in the raw data to a central database and then let the pieces of paper go because he never realised that 20 years later he would be held to account over them’.

Asked by Mr Harrabin about these issues, Professor Jones admitted the lack of organisation in the system had contributed to his reluctance to share data with critics, which he regretted.
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But he denied he had cheated over the data or unfairly influenced the scientific process, and said he still believed recent temperature rises were predominantly man-made.

Asked about whether he lost track of data, Professor Jones said: ‘There is some truth in that. We do have a trail of where the weather stations have come from but it’s probably not as good as it should be.

‘There’s a continual updating of the dataset. Keeping track of everything is difficult. Some countries will do lots of checking on their data then issue improved data, so it can be very difficult. We have improved but we have to improve more.’

He also agreed that there had been two periods which experienced similar warming, from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998, but said these could be explained by natural phenomena whereas more recent warming could not.

He further admitted that in the last 15 years there had been no ‘statistically significant’ warming, although he argued this was a blip rather than the long-term trend.

And he said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.

Sceptics believe there is strong evidence that the world was warmer between about 800 and 1300 AD than now because of evidence of high temperatures in northern countries.

But climate change advocates have dismissed this as false or only applying to the northern part of the world.

Professor Jones departed from this consensus when he said: ‘There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia.

‘For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

‘Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today, then obviously the late 20th Century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm than today, then the current warmth would be unprecedented.’

Sceptics said this was the first time a senior scientist working with the IPCC had admitted to the possibility that the Medieval Warming Period could have been global, and therefore the world could have been hotter then than now.

Professor Jones criticised those who complained he had not shared his data with them, saying they could always collate their own from publicly available material in the US. And he said the climate had not cooled ‘until recently – and then barely at all. The trend is a warming trend’.

Mr Harrabin told Radio 4’s Today programme that, despite the controversies, there still appeared to be no fundamental flaws in the majority scientific view that climate change was largely man-made.

But Dr Benny Pieser, director of the sceptical Global Warming Policy Foundation, said Professor Jones’s ‘excuses’ for his failure to share data were hollow as he had shared it with colleagues and ‘mates’.

He said that until all the data was released, sceptics could not test it to see if it supported the conclusions claimed by climate change advocates.

He added that the professor’s concessions over medieval warming were ‘significant’ because they were his first public admission that the science was not settled.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z0fxgYR2tX